Snowball in Hell

Infinite wisdom is not something I’m inclined to accuse governments, government agencies, or government agents of having, even in best-case scenarios. In worst-case scenarios, the best I can say about them is that they’re afflicted with gross incompetence and terminal stupidity, two character traits that always seem to tag along hand-in-hand with government, going wherever it is governments go and doing whatever it is governments do. You don’t want to know what the worst thing I can say about them is. Trust me.

To make my point, let me cite a case that graced The Oregonian’s front page on several occasions over the last few weeks: Jim Filipetti vs. the State of Oregon, in the matter of “Snowball,” the deer.

A few years back, Jim found a fawn in dire need of a champion lying near the road. The fawn’s hind legs were deformed in a way that prevented it from walking. Without Jim’s intervention, the fawn surely would have died in a matter of hours, meeting its end as coyote chow (or whatever fate befalls defenseless critters that lack a means of self-preservation). Being a compassionate person, Jim did what any rational, compassionate person would do; he took the hapless animal home with him and began a long process of nurturing and rehabilitation. Eventually, Snowball became the family pet and everyone lived happily ever after—at least until the State of Oregon, in a desperate bid to retain its stranglehold on power over all creatures great and small, thrust itself into the mix.

Someone—probably a disgruntled relative—ratted Jim out to the authorities (it’s against Oregon law for private citizens to capture wild animals and hold them in captivity), and the bullshit commenced. To make a fairly long story fairly short, the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife confiscated Snowball and her two-year old offspring, Bucky, although neither was a fish nor wild.

Before the situation ever progressed to this point, wildlife officials should have asked these essential questions: Were the animals well cared for? Were their needs being met? Were they healthy? In each case the answer was a resounding yes, and authorities didn’t need to take the animals into custody to make these determinations. This is precisely the time when Fish & Wildlife authorities should have exercised a little restraint and lots of fiscal responsibility and simply butted out. Instead, they persisted in their efforts to maintain total control, regardless of the cost to Oregon taxpayers.

Some of the options under discussion by the State regarding disposition of Snowball and Bucky included putting the animals down, returning them to the wild (although neither animal was experienced at being wild), releasing them to the custody of a licensed wildlife caretaker, and returning them to Filipetti.

For a time, putting down the deer seemed to be the State-preferred option, but cooler (and presumably smarter) heads prevailed. Unfortunately, all the heads put together weren’t smart enough to do the right thing.

After much wrangling in the courts, Bucky was subsequently relieved of his antlers, given a vasectomy, and released into the wild, just in time for rutting season. It remains to be seen whether this act served the animal’s best interests, or whether it only served to demonstrate the State’s power of authority and to puff up the egos of a few bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, amid an outpouring of public sentiment, Snowball took up residence in a licensed elk preserve as Filepetti continued his fight to get her back. Finally, a judge ruled that Snowball should be returned to the Filipetti family; Fish & Wildlife immediately appealed the decision, retaining custody of the once-again hapless deer until the matter is settled in the courts.

To date, the matter is unresolved. To date, Oregon has spent more than $38,000 of the taxpayers’ money to exercise control over an animal that’s ultimately worth less than $1,000 cut and wrapped. Of course, Filipetti has invested far more than a thousand dollars in caring for Snowball and Bucky. Snowball’s vet bills alone must be astronomical, and then there are Jim’s out-of-pocket expenses for feed, and the cost of building a safe enclosure—a respectable amount of money, I’m sure, when all the sums are lumped together.

Bucky is pretty much history, but Snowball is still a ward of the State. If, as State officials claim, all Oregon wildlife belongs to the citizens of Oregon, then—barring Snowball’s return to Filipetti and family—the State should reimburse Jim Filipetti for providing, out of his own pocket, for the animals’ welfare on behalf of the people.

And in the future, Fish & Wildlife officials would do well to consider worms worthy of State protection, too—before they open another can of them.

False Assumptions

In the wake of several fatal or serious injury bicycle accidents in the Portland area during the past few weeks, bicycle safety has been a hot topic in the local media. Jonathan Maus’ BikePortland blog, in particular, not only features numerous articles regarding these unfortunate incidents, but regular readers of the blog continue to carry on lively debates about rights-of-way, who is at fault, better (and safer) bicycle infrastructure, and bicycle safety in general.

Following the two fatalities involving right-turning trucks, a preponderance of readers leaped aboard the law-is-always-right-so-let’s-blame-the-truck-driver bandwagon without giving the matter much critical thought. The notion that laws can protect us gives us warm, fuzzy feelings of safety and security, but in reality laws do nothing of the kind. It’s a dangerous mindset, and to embrace it is to guarantee future fatalities.

To demonstrate how seriously flawed this “law as protector” mindset is, let me point out that laws do nothing to prevent murderers, rapists, and armed robbers from perpetrating crimes against law-abiding citizens. Nor do they prevent motorists from making grievous errors of judgment. At best, laws provide added incentive for people who are not inclined to break the law to not break the law. They also provide employment opportunities for cops, lawyers, judges, and others who work within the legal system. In practice, laws are more effective at punishing offenders after the fact of the offense than they are in preventing the offense in the first place.

Conventional wisdom says that because bicyclists always have the right-of-way when riding in a designated bike lane, the law should be enough to protect them. Yeah, right! We’ve all seen how well that works. Conventional wisdom is seldom wise and, too often, it’s flat-out wrong. Just because the law says that motorists must yield to bikes when making a right turn across a bike lane doesn’t mean that cyclists should automatically assume that that’s going to happen all of the time—or even most of the time—particularly when trucks are involved.

Yeah, I know it’s fashionable for cyclists to condemn any truck driver involved in a collision with a bicycle, especially when said collision results from a right hook. Unfortunately, reality looks different from a truck driver’s perspective than it does from a cyclist’s perspective (neither of which squares with the law’s perspective). At best, the law offers a “one size fits all” solution that serves no one (except lawyers) particularly well.

This short rant is not intended to advocate for doing away with laws, or even doing away with lawyers, for that matter (although the latter wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing). Rather, it’s meant to advocate for improved bicycle safety, which begins—but in no way ends—with cyclists.

Cyclists who believe otherwise are living on borrowed time.

Missing in Action

The Rev. David Schwartz, and his companion, Cheryl Gibbs, died minutes after impact when their Toyota Corolla left the road near milepost 26, on Highway 26, on June 8th. A state trooper out of Astoria, responding to a 9-1-1 dispatch that bounced back-and-forth between jurisdictions (and left out some critical information in the process), checked both sides of the highway between mileposts 25 and 27 in multiple passes that failed to yield any trace of Schwartz’s car. Elsie-Vinemaple Fire Department members also checked both sides of the highway between the 25 and 27 mile markers, producing exactly the same results.

It’s no surprise that searchers failed to locate the car. In the absence of skid marks or other indicators to pinpoint exactly where Schwartz’s Corolla left the road, searchers hadn’t a clue where to look. That the wrecked car was obscured by heavy brush 20 feet down an embankment and couldn’t be seen from the road further complicated the task. A Civil Air Patrol pilot finally spotted the car from the air on Sunday, July 1st.

Family members of the deceased victims were quick to criticize the Oregon State Police, the 9-1-1 dispatchers who, admittedly, screwed up (but the screw-up had no bearing on whether Schwartz and Gibbs lived or died), the State of Oregon, and even the Portland Police Department for its (non) role in the sorry chain of events.

While I can understand their pain, I don’t understand their anger or their rush to place the blame for this senseless tragedy anywhere except for where the blame rightfully belongs. By that I mean squarely on the victims themselves.

I can hear the howls of outrage: What? Blame the victims (hey, it works in rape cases)? That’s preposterous! Yada, yada, yada . . .!

Damned right, blame the victims. At the time of this particular incident, Schwartz was in violation of at least two Oregon laws; he failed to maintain control of his vehicle, and his seat belt wasn’t fastened. He may have been in violation of others. For certain, had Schwartz been operating within the law none of this would have happened. Untold numbers of people wouldn’t have wasted untold numbers of hours conducting a fruitless search, and Schwartz’s family would have had no excuse to blindly unleash their self-righteous indignation against various Oregon agencies that—regardless of their degree of competence or total lack thereof—tried to help.

Before idiot Californians come to Oregon and do stupid things, the consequences of which they then attribute to Oregonians and the State of Oregon, they should take a hard look at their own incompetence and make the necessary adjustments. They could start by checking their stupidity at the border. If they must hold on to their stupidity, they can always pick it up on the way back.

People like Rev. Schwartz, James Kim, and the mountain climbers that died on Mt. Hood last winter put Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest to the test, and prove it every time. Evolution takes care of its own.

Stupid Publicity Stunts

A few days ago, local news reported on a publicity stunt conducted by a Chicago-area radio or TV station—I’m not sure which it was—in which they dropped a piece-of-crap car 500 feet onto a grid. Whoever “owned” the square on the grid where the car landed became the instant winner of a new Hummer.

Does anyone else see the problems inherent in this deeply flawed concept? What problems, you say? Well, let’s start with the obvious. First, how difficult can it be to hit a stationary target at 500 feet from a hovering helicopter? Seems like it’s too easy to rig the outcome, to me. Wouldn’t it have been fairer to make the drop, from 35,000 feet, from the underbelly of a 747 cargo plane (sans bombsight) as it passes over the city? You could declare whomever the car landed on the winner, and the whole event would have more of a random flavor to it.

A less obvious problem—albeit a more egregious one—concerns the prize that was awarded. A Hummer? Leave it to the media in a city that prides itself on its “green” initiatives to come up with that one. I guess because Hummers aren’t selling well due to high gas prices, GM dealers clear out showrooms by offering bargain-basement prices for Hummers to various media outlets, who then give them away to participants in stupid publicity stunts.

It just goes to show you how misguided and shortsighted American society really is, how egocentric, how selfish, how gluttonous our people are. We behave as if it’s our birthright to overproduce, overconsume, and overspend, and we live in a permanent state of denial while our arrogant greed drives most animal species to the brink of extinction.

The Great American Dream is a global nightmare, people. We’ve got our priorities all wrong and, until we get them right, we’ll continue to be the primary destroyers of the planet we live on. Instead of leading the way in forging solutions to critical national and global issues, U.S. business and political leaders bumble along in hopes that business as usual will save the day, and that all of the problems will just go away if only we ignore them a little while longer.

Has our thinking become so stilted and our vision so narrow that we can’t embrace the idea of multiple winners? Must there always be but one winner and many losers? Whatever happened to win/win?

If the Chicago-area broadcast medium mentioned at the beginning of this rant had its collective head on straight, it would have dropped the Hummer instead of the clunker, then used the combined weight of both vehicles to determine how many Trek bicycles (of equal combined weight) could be given away as prizes.

There would literally be several hundreds of bicycle winners, hundreds of thousands in the Chicago area benefiting from less traffic congestion and decreased energy consumption, millions benefiting from fewer local greenhouse gas emissions, and billions upon billions of life forms around the planet able to breathe a little easier—perhaps even enjoy a few seconds or a few minutes of extended life expectancy—because of this visionary environmental approach to media publicity.

If you want the biggest bang for your publicity buck, you’ve got to impact as many lives as possible, not just one. Think win/win/win/win!

That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Crossover SUVs

Panel trucks and station wagons were the precursors to the modern-day SUV. Almost every business that made regular pick-ups and/or deliveries in LTL quantities had at least one. Somewhere along the line, panel truck married station wagon, and not long after, SUV was born.

SUV stands for Sports Utility Vehicle, although I’ve never understood where “Sports” enters the equation (unless it has something to do with “soccer mom”). These ungainly contraptions are about as sporty as a comatose quadriplegic, and every bit as exciting.

Some people claim that SUV stands for Stupid Ugly Van, or Shortsighted Utopian Vision, or Silly Urban Vanity, or Supremely Unnecessary Vulgarity. My personal favorite is Seriously Unstable Vehicle, although all of the above designations seem to be equally applicable.

Now there’s something called a “crossover” SUV. Judging from the recent spate of fatal accidents involving SUVs, it’s not hard to figure out how they might have come by that label (which, I might add, is entirely appropriate).

If you’re carrying a tad too much speed on right-hand turns, they tend to cross over the centerline, where they risk smashing head-on into oncoming traffic. Again, carrying a tad too much speed on left-hand turns, they tend to cross over the fog line, where they risk smashing into a tree or running over a cliff.

Crossover, indeed!

Make a Commitment to Environmental Sanity

Now that Earth Day #38 is upon us, it’s time that we, as concerned citizens of good conscience with a penchant for sustainable living, reflect on local, national, and global events of the past year and ask ourselves some really tough questions. Are we, as global stewards, doing enough, both collectively and individually, to spare Earth—and ourselves—the ravages of global climate change? Are we demanding that our civic, corporate, and government leaders advocate for sustainable practices in all segments of our society? Do we hold polluters accountable for the damage they cause to the environment? Have we, as individuals, managed to get our own rapacious consumerism under control? In all cases the answer is no, and that means we have a lot of work to do.

The collective insanity of consumer culture panders to economic greed at the expense of cultural, socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. No society that devours its resources faster than those resources can be renewed can long endure. What we desperately need are visionaries—inventors, planners, designers, engineers, financiers, educators, and entrepreneurs—all working together to create a sane, rational socioeconomic model for sustainable living that the rest of the world not only will want to emulate but can emulate without putting the entire planet in peril.

Capitalism, in its current form, is a fatally flawed economic concept in desperate need of a social conscience. Any economy that systematically consumes all of its resources while simultaneously polluting the environment is headed for certain destruction. Change is still possible, but the time for change is now. Every day of procrastination brings us one day closer to the day of reckoning, and the day of reckoning is not as far away as we think.

Earth Day is a good thing, but Earth Day once a year is not nearly enough. Only when we make every day Earth Day will we begin to show the level of commitment necessary to make, and keep, our world habitable for the next seven generations, and for seven generations beyond that, ad infinitum.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

One of physic’s basic tenets states that every action produces a reaction. It’s a natural law that applies to politics, economics, and many other endeavors, as well; it does not adhere exclusively to physics.

When an action is a known quantity, the reaction it produces is predictable. However, when actions are unknown quantities (as in things that have never been tried before), the reactions often manifest as unintended consequences. Sometimes, actions are so intense that they touch off a chain-reaction of events in which each event produces its own set of unintended consequences. Like a handful of stones cast into a pond, major events cause overlapping ripples that radiate outward, seemingly forever.

Take the invention of the steam engine, for instance. When James Watt patented his design for the first practical steam engine in 1769, he ushered in the Industrial Age, which led to the Machine Age, which in turn gave rise to the Automobile Age. I’m not sure if there’s enough room on the entire Internet to list all of the adverse reactions (unintended consequences) attributable to the automobile’s invention; they are legion.

From the way we build our communities and structure our lifestyles to global warming and war in the Middle East, cars play a pivotal role in shaping and defining our society. Cars brought us more freedom, greater independence, unprecedented prestige, and never-before-known convenience in quantities that guaranteed their ubiquity. Cars brought us closer to everything, even as they made everything unsustainable.

Because of the automobile, people left family farms in droves to begin new lives in cities and suburbs. The popular abandonment of the nation’s farms fueled the proliferation of factory farms and the ongoing expansion of suburban sprawl.

Suburban sprawl gobbles up prime farmland, and the monocrop agriculture practiced by factory farms destroys the environment in numerous ways, not the least of which is widespread pollution caused by farm chemicals—insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, growth hormones, and antibiotics.

Are these end results? Not hardly! They’re only early results that paved the way for more serious consequences that have already befallen us and for others that lie in wait for us in the not-too-distant future.

Our attachment to cars made us lazy and fat and dependent on foreign oil. Cars gave us easier access to medical care, even as they increased our need for medical care. They gave us strip malls and parking lots, rush hours and traffic jams, fast food and drive-in everything.

Despite the rising costs of owning, driving and maintaining automobiles, despite worsening pollution and global warming, despite rising gasoline prices and exorbitant insurance rates, and despite the frustrations of traffic congestion, people are reluctant to give up their cars. Their obsession with cars blinds them to reality while allowing them to maintain an illusion of well being.

Car-addicted people aren’t about to change their ways. At a time when car addicts should be thinking about curbing their addiction and looking at sustainable options, they are, in fact, demanding bigger, heavier, more powerful and less fuel efficient cars in greater numbers than ever before.

Of course, more cars need bigger, better streets and highways, which always seem to invite more cars. Maybe we should just pave America, paint some lines, and call it a day.